Sunday, 1 February 2015

Blog Tour: Hobson & Choi - Nick Bryant

Welcome to my stop on the tour for the fabulously funny Hobson & Choi books by Nick Bryan! Book one is the aptly named The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf and book two, Rush Jobs! Scroll down to find out more about the books, the author and your chance to win your own copies of this irreverently funny crime series with two of the most hilarious leads I've read in a while.

“If we get 400 followers, John Hobson will solve that nasty
wolf-murder case for free! Fight the thing himself if he has to!
#HobsonVsWolf!”

Angelina Choi was only trying to drum up some Twitter followers and
make a good impression on her first day interning at John Hobson’s
one-man detective agency.But the campaign went viral and now they have a murder to solve, no
money coming in, and an unwilling Hobson faced with battling some
enormous beast.With both follower and body counts rising, can they crack the case without offending everyone or being eaten by a huge dog?

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is the first case starring Hobson &
Choi, a bickering, mismatched detective duo for 21st century London.
This book collects the debut storyline of the hit darkly comic crime web
serial, extensively rewritten and improved for this definitive edition.

“Sometimes #crime feels
like the Matrix. Or the #patriarchy or #porn. It's everywhere, even in
people you trusted, and there's so MUCH of it.”

Angelina Choi
returns for her second and final week of work experience at John
Hobson’s detective agency, ready for anything after their first
successful murder solve.

After all that online buzz, they’re in
phenomenal demand. Can Hobson & Choi solve a kidnapping, play
chicken with corporate crime, beat back gentrification, save a dog from
drug dealers and head off violent backlash from their last case?

Or will grim revelations about Hobson’s past leave them floundering in the chaos?

Rush
Jobs collects the second major storyline in the Hobson & Choi saga,
#1 on Jukepop Serials and #2 in Dark Comedy on Amazon, adding brand new
chapters and scenes to the case.

If you like your crime solving private eyes with a dash of humor, a lot of cynicism and one of the oddest parings in history then the Hobson & Choi books are definitely for you. John Hobson is a one man detective agency stuck firmly in the 20th century and really doesn't know how he's ended up with a sixteen year old intern for two weeks. It's not like he actually does much... Angelina Choi is is sixteen and wondering how she can use her her internship for Hobson and turn it into something for more permanent. In setting up a Twitter account for technophobe Hobson, she inadvertently gets them caught up in a murder case where the bodies are piling up quickly!

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf sees the unusual duo solving murders that seem to involve some sort of giant hound. As Choi has just tweeted about Hobson fighting a wolf if their twitter account gets to 400 followers the timing all seems to be a little too handy for their first case together. What follows is the sort of crime caper you don't get to read very often, the story is more about the characters rather than the plot and I absolutely fell in love with them. The case almost takes second place to some of the funniest characters I've read in a long time and we're introduced to a lot of them - Choi's adoptive mother, Hobson's ex-wife who just happens to be a serving police officer and gets them out of more than one scrape, the hipster receptionist Will who Choi takes a shine to, Benny, the Pimp and the staff of the Inspiration Gestation Station (yes, really...)Rush Jobs follows on from The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf. Choi is in her second week of interning and has no idea how to say to Hobson that she'd like to stay but on the other hand it does look like she might have an actual date with Will the receptionist. Hobson has burnt his bridges with Ellie, his ex-wife and is floundering a bit. Instead of one case our dynamic duo take on several, including a kidnapping involving an accountant and a shady recruitment agency, a drug mule dog who might just be the newest recruit and a favor for Benny, the chap from the first book who sits outside the tube station promoting the word of God, and actually turns out to be an estate agent!In my opinion Rush Jobs is the better book, maybe because we see Hobson & Choi working on more cases, but I love the dynamic that's developing between them and I'm thrilled that they will be returning in Case Three: The Hardest Bargains In Town. It's quite hard to know how to categorize these books, there is massive crossover appeal I think but given that there is a lot of profanity (the F-word is a favorite of both Hobson & Choi) I would be wary of giving them to a YA reader. They're both four clock reads for me but having said that they could have been five clock reads, however there is use of of a swear word that personally I don't like and so I find it quite jarring to read in a book (the only exception being Trainspotting!) If you're looking for a fast paced funny read you can't really go wrong with the adventures of Hobson & Choi.

About the Author

Nick Bryan is a London-based writer of genre
fiction, usually with some blackly comic twist. As well as the detective
saga Hobson & Choi, he is also working on a novel about the real
implications of deals with the devil and has stories in several
anthologies.

More details on his other work and news on future Hobson & Choi releases can be found on his blog at NickBryan.com or on Twitter as @NickMB. Both are updated with perfect and reasonable regularity.Subscribe to his mailing list using the form in the sidebar of NickBryan.com to get news first and an all-new free Hobson & Choi short story immediately!